Conventional methods of finding needed information have been mainly through search engines for unstructured data, and database queries for structured data. A problem with these conventional methods is that the user needs to know how to formulate a good query. Common search engines require the user to come up with pertinent keywords, while the engine may often return a long list of results that the user needs to sift through.
However, there are often times when the user may not know what exact keywords to use to search for the information they are looking for, or does not know or does not remember what exact keywords are contained in documents that the user wants to search for. In such cases, finding the needed information can be difficult and time-consuming.
Furthermore, conventional search engines display search results as links to the documents, together with a brief excerpt from the original documents showing the part of the content in the linked documents containing a keyword in the query. An excerpt like that helps the user to determine whether the linked document is relevant to the intended search or not; however, users need to follow the link to open the document and read through the document to locate the specific information being sought. Often, users may only need a quick answer to a question, or a brief overview of what is being said about a topic that the user is querying. In such cases, reading though the entire document to find the relevant information is inefficient.
More effective ways of organizing and presenting information contained in unstructured text contents are needed.